[cjs_ac]

As someone with many heretical opinions, I’ve found it very easy to avoid accusations of heresy by just shutting up. The right to free speech is not an obligation to speak freely. As a software engineer, my colleagues don’t need to know my opinions on economic policy for me to be able to work effectively with them.

[appreciatorBus]

This is great individual strategy, and is an important part of being polite generally.

But the article isn’t about people not wanting to be polite, it’s about perfectly polite people being told that some ideas are off limits in all context of life except sitting alone in a dark room with your thoughts. And of course, there are some ideas so extreme that they do belong there and do belong in the ranks of heresy, but the current mania has expanded this category rather generously.

[ethbr1]

It seems like there are four things being conflated (for simplicity's sake, no malice) here:

- Actual day-to-day acquaintances' responses to someone's perceived ideological heresies (read: your friends having a problem with your views)

- Individual and bandwagon responses to someone's perceived ideological heresies (read: "the internet" having a problem with someone's opinions)

- Corporate responses to someone's perceived ideological heresies (read: Google banning accounts or firing an employee)

- Government responses to someone's perceived ideological heresies (read: the executive branch punitively cutting unrelated funding or the DOJ starting frivolous lawsuits)

Ordered thusly because I think people (regardless of their orientations) have increasing issue with those things the farther down the list you go.

And especially #3 (corporate) and #4 (government) seem to have gotten out of control after 2016, somewhat as a response to worsening disingenuous behavior by #2 (the internet).

It's one thing if friends decide to not be friends because of expressed views. It's worse getting mobbed by 100+ strangers from the internet. And it should probably be unacceptable that there are corporate or government consequences for some of the low-grade "Well that's just your like your opinion, man" stuff in the last decade.

[Levitz]

I suspect this happens a lot, and am unsure about what the first and second order consequences are.

Most evidently, positions that are not paraded around face less backlash, so people are just not as equipped to deal with them. But then again, it's also evident that those positions don't spread as easily, often being left to niche spaces, which do have a tendency to become echo chambers, cue polarization.